WASHINGTON — Former Romney spokesman Richard Grenell left the campaign because he felt like his reputation was being destroyed by criticism and he was unable to defend himself, according to sources who have spoken with Grenell and understand his thinking.

But by the time Grenell gave notice last weekend of his intention to quit, the Romney campaign viewed any controversy about his hiring as having largely evaporated, and Romney aides were surprised when they learned of Grenell’s wish to resign.

“In the scale of things, we didn’t view it as a major story and in fact thought it had blown over,” a source close to the Romney campaign said of the controversy around Grenell.

And we get a few more paragraphs in that vein, all gee-if-he’d-stuck-around-he’d-be-OK-by-now.

Except, at the verrrry end of the story, we find the real story — namely, that he’d been told by the Romney campaign to keep his lips zipped and not make any public statements:

The Romney campaign has said Grenell had not been sent out to talk
about foreign policy issues before this week because he was not
scheduled to start until May 1. But that explanation did not make sense
to some, including one former high-ranking Bush administration official.

“Why wasn’t Rick the spokesman in the last couple of days, when
foreign policy was paramount?” former Bush White House press secretary
Ari Fleischer asked the Washington Post‘s Greg Sargent . “That’s the piece I don’t understand.”

“I don’t know why he wasn’t the spokesman on foreign policy for the
last several days. It’s something that nobody understands,” Fleischer
added.

Last week Grenell was “instructed to shut up” before a foreign policy
conference call with reporters, eroding his standing with journalists
on the beat, Andrew Sullivan reported and HuffPost confirmed.

Turns out that the reference to the Sullivan piece was a late addition to the story, which partially explains why it got stuck at the bottom of the story. That, and the unwillingness of news outlets to do proper rewrites nowadays.

Wegesaid

“….the unwillingness of news outlets to do proper rewrites nowadays.” Glad you said “proper.” I’ve been tracking the Senser trial and during the day the Strib’s Amy Simons would post long accounts of the trial, but by night the Strib editors would pare her articles down, invariably short-changing the prosecution and giving bumper coverage to defense allegations.

Locally I think this trial is the first solid example of online journalism. Even the TV stations are updating their stories multiple times a day, often without video tie-ins (while the Strib keeps creating videos of their reporters essentially reading their stories out loud).

The media is absolutely corrupt and, in my opinion, irredeemably so. They need rules for online reporting, rules that should be posted where readers can see them.